Quotes about first-sentence

Amit Kalantri -

The most difficult thing about writing is writing the first line.

Dorothy L. Sayers - Strong Poison

There were crimson roses on the bench they looked like splashes of blood.

Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina

All happy families are alike each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Adam Rapp - Nocturne: A Play

Fifteen years ago I killed my sister.

Cecelia Ahern -

I am girl of definitions, of logic, of black and white.Remember this.

J.K. Rowling - Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

Daphne du Maurier - Rebecca

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

Elizabeth Leiknes - The Understory

There once was a woman named Story Easton who couldn't decide if she should kill herself, or eat a double cheeseburger.

Elizabeth Leiknes - The Understory

Deep down, Story Easton knew what would happen if she attempted to off herself—she would fail It was a matter of probability. This was not a new thing, failure. She was, had always been, a failure of fairy-tale proportion. Quitting wasn’t Story’s problem. She had tried, really tried, lots of things during different stages of her life—Girl Scours, the viola, gardening, Tommy Andres from senior year American Lit—but zero cookie sales, four broken strings, two withered azalea bushes, and one unique

Lynda Barry - Cruddy

Dear Anyone Who Finds This, Do not blame the drugs.

Jeffrey Eugenides - The Virgin Suicides

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.

Stephanie Lawton - Want

If you want vampires and werewolves, faeries, fallen angels or zombies, you won't find them here. I know a real-life monster.

Graeme Shimmin - A Kill in the Morning

I don't like killing, but I'm good at it. Murder isn't so bad from a distance, just shapes popping up in my scope. Close-up work though - a garrotte around a target's neck or a knife in their heart - it's not for me. Too much empathy, that's my problem. Usually. But not today. Today is different . . .

S. L. Viehl -

All I was trying to do when they caught me was bury my mother in an unmarked grave.

Gail Giles - Shattering Glass

Simon Glass was easy to hate. I never knew exactly why, there was just too much to pick from. I guess, really, we each hated him for a different reason, but we didn't realize it until the day we killed him.

Jhumpa Lahiri - The Namesake

On a sticky August evening two weeks before her due date, Ashima Ganguli stands in the kitchen of a Central Square apartment, combining Rice Krispies and Planters peanuts and chopped red onion in bowl.

Barbara Kingsolver - Miracle: A Year of Food Life

This story about good food begins in a quick-stop convenience market.

Laura Shapiro - Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America

Toward the end of February 1954, James Beard was at work in his Greenwich Village kitchen doing what he most loved to do: cooking delicious meals.

David Wong Louie - The Barbarians are Coming

Feast or famine. My plate is suddenly full.

James Carlos Blake - The Friends of Pancho Villa

The greatest tragedy that can befall a man is never to know who he really is.

Rafael Sabatini - Scaramouche

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.

Sarvenaz Tash - The Mapmaker and the Ghost

Goldenrod Moram had a first name that sounded like it belonged in the middle of a fairy tale, where she would be the dazzling princess in need of rescuing.

Robin Wasserman - The Book of Blood and Shadow

I should probably start with the blood.

Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Sarah Wylie - All These Lives

This is how it feels to die: It starts from outside and works its way in.

James Carlos Blake - Red Grass River: A Legend

If the devil ever raised a garden, the Everglades was it.

Stefan Bachmann - The Peculiar

Feathers fell from the sky. Like black snow, they drifted onto an old city called Bath.

Mira Grant - Deadline

Our story opens where countless stories have ended in the last twenty-seven years: with an idiot—in this case, Rebecca Atherton, head of the After the End Times Irwins, winner of the Golden Steve-o Award for valor in the face of the undead—deciding it would be a good idea to go out and poke a zombie with a stick to see what happens.

Mira Grant - Blackout

My story ended where so many stories have ended since the Rising: with a man—in this case, my adoptive brother and best friend, Shaun—holding a gun to the base of my skull as the virus in my blood betrayed me, transforming me from a thinking human being into something better suited to a horror movie.

Mercedes Lackey - Dead Reckoning

Jett Gallatin expected trouble in Alsop, Texas—but not zombies.

Christopher Moore - The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror

Christmas crept into Pine Cove like a creeping Christmas thing: dragging garland, ribbon, and sleigh bells, oozing eggnog, reeking of pine, and threatening festive doom like a cold sore under the mistletoe.

Bertrand Russell - The Problems of Philosophy

Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?

Dan Savage - Skipping Towards Gomorrah: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America

The truly revolutionary promise of our nation's founding document is the freedom to pursue happiness-with-a-capital-H.

Alice Hoffman - Incantation

If every life is a river, then it's little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face. My name once meant daughter, grandaughter, friend, sister, beloved. Now those words mean only what their letters spell out; Star in the night sky. Truth in the darkness.I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I'd be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dr

Donna Tartt - The Secret History

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

Harriet Rubin - The Princessa: Machiavelli For Women

Women have always been spies.

Heinrich von Kleist - Kleist: Selected Writings

In Santiago, the capital of the kingdom of Chile, at the moment of the great earthquake of 1647 in which many thousands lost their lives, a young Spaniard called Jeronimo Rugera was standing beside one of the pillars in the prison to which he had been committed on a criminal charge, and he was about to hang himself.

Shirley Jackson - The Haunting of Hill House

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality.

Rebbecca Ray - Pure

I was about thirteen when I started letting boys feel me up.

Adam Rapp - 33 Snowfish

On top of everything else, Boobie's got the clap.

Lauren Oliver - Before I Fall

They say that just before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that's not how it happened for me.

Katherine Dunn - Geek Love

When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing.

Michael Grant - Gone

One minute the teacher was talking about the Civil War. And the next minute he was gone. There. Gone. No 'poof.' No flash of light. No explosion.

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